There are no signs that The Pirate Bay will disappear anytime soon, but pirate preppers anticipating such a doomsday scenario can now download an updated and improved copy of the world's most resilient BitTorrent site. A backup of all crucial data has been packed into a tiny 75 megabyte archive, small enough to carry with you at all times. The archive of more than 2 million magnet links has received a seal of approval from The Pirate Bay team and is now up for grabs.

Despite numerous lawsuits and continuing pressure from the entertainment industries The Pirate Bay is still alive.

However, even if the site was eradicated right now its contents wouldn’t be lost. Yesterday a new public copy of all the magnet links hosted on the world’s most famous BitTorrent site was made available to the public.

The current TPB copy is an updated and improved version of a similar release last year. This means it includes more than half a million new titles, and it also allows us to see how The Pirate Bay has been developing over time.

The new release comes in two flavors. A 75 megabyte version with titles and magnet links and a larger 631 megabyte one which also includes the comments, descriptions and file sizes. Both archives are stored in an easy to handle XML file.

The Pirate Bay currently indexes a little over 2 million magnet links according to the scraped data. However, nearly one-third of these have no seeders and can’t be shared. In fact, only one-quarter of the torrents has more than 4 seeders.

Some will notice that the 2 million figure contradicts the 4.5 million torrents claimed by The Pirate Bay in the footer of the site, but is accurate. The higher number is based on data pulled from TPB’s index and public trackers combined.

As we can see below, The Pirate Bay continues to expand with more than 500,000 torrents added during the past 12 months.

Torrent database over time

From a title analysis it further appears that video content is popular. With 184,015 appearances “XviD” is most mentioned, followed by other video related keywords such as HDTV, x264, DVDRip and 720p.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Karel Bílek who created the archives and carried out the data crunching. He tells us that part of his motivation is to ensure that the Pirate Bay’s contents remain available in the event something happens to the site.

“Pirate Bay is a great resource of books, movies, music… and it would be a shame if it was brought down,” Bílek says.

“The torrents themselves are kind of resilient, but still, you need the basic information about the torrents. So this is an archive of sorts, if the Pirate Bay is brought down, the information from the site can still be used and the site somehow reconstructed.”

As a computational linguistics student, the experiment is also a learning exercise for the Czech student.

The Pirate Bay have also given the release their blessing. While TPB is not happy with anti-piracy groups pirating their data for “nefarious” purposes, they don’t see a problem with people downloading a copy of the site’s index for personal use.